Violence continues to claim young lives in Syria: Engineer strangled in Al-Sisiniya, man shot in Suwayda

TARTUS and SUWAYDA, Syria — On Wednesday morning, Rawan Amtanios Saloum, a young engineer barely a year into her professional life, was discovered dead in her family home — an act of violence that has shaken Al-Sisiniya to its countryside.

The official medical report was unequivocal: “Her neck was broken, and she was strangled to death.”

Rawan, the only child of a quiet, respected household, was known for her kindness and unassuming nature. “She was beloved, the daughter of a good home,” said a neighbor, struggling to contain his grief. But the sorrow surrounding her death has quickly given way to a deeper, more unsettling emotion — fear.

Outside the church where candles flickered in silent tribute, an elderly resident voiced a sentiment now shared by many: Taking a life has become disturbingly easy — without justification, without remorse.

This brutal act did more than end a young life, it shattered a community’s sense of safety. Rawan’s death has left a scar not only on her grieving family, but on the collective psyche of Al-Sisiniya, where the unspoken bond of trust among neighbors has been gravely undermined. In an instant, a village defined by familiarity and harmony found itself grappling with vulnerability and unease.

Hundreds of kilometers away in Suwayda — where the realities of conflict intertwine with deepening poverty and the exhausting weight of uncertainty — grief speaks through the voices of those who remain.

Among them is Fadi Saqr al-Khoury, who narrowly escaped death when a rocket strike reduced his home and car to ruins. “It was nothing short of divine intervention,” he recalled, explaining how he had stepped out just moments before the explosion. “The room that was destroyed was our children’s room … everything is gone, but they survived because they were away at their universities in Damascus and Latakia.”

As he stood before the remains of what was once a family home, his gaze fixed on the rubble, the silence was heavy — broken only by the unspoken memory of the blast that could have taken everything.

Elsewhere in the city, sorrow takes another form. Heba Dakhlallah al-Jaber sits in mourning, the sister of Salama al-Jaber — a young man recently killed by a sniper’s bullet. Salama, a graduate in Arabic literature, had opened a modest business to help support his family. On the day he was killed, he had closed his shop to visit a friend, Attiya, but never made it.

“His body lay in the street for 24 hours,” Heba recounts, her voice trembling between grief and disbelief. “We buried him in the darkness of night, in haste, with only the priest and a handful of young men from the village. People couldn’t accept that he was gone — they kissed his forehead and stroked his hair as if trying to hold onto him one last time.”

Salama’s death is one more name added to a growing ledger of loss, another life ended without warning in a city where mourning has become a ritual and the cost of survival grows heavier by the day.

These stories are not isolated tragedies. They are fragments of a broader, deeply troubling reality unfolding across the country — a grim tableau of cities and villages increasingly vulnerable to violence, and of a collective sense of safety unraveling, even in places that had once withstood the harshest years of conflict.

At the funerals of Rawan and Salama, and amid the ruins left by the explosion in Suwayda, a single question echoes in every whispered conversation and tearful embrace. “When did the value of human life become so diminished?”